"Today the Fed should formally announce that after nearly a decade, it’s going to start vacuuming up a lot of that money it printed in 2008...Bottom line: they’re going to start cutting the lights and turning off the music...And given the enormous impact that this policy had on asset prices, it would be foolish to think its reversal will be consequence-free."

"Sure, criminals might use Bitcoin. They also use Amazon.com gift cards and government bonds... Ironically for Jamie Dimon, criminals even use JP Morgan bank accounts to launder their money, considering that the bank has paid BILLIONS in fines over the last few years for failing to detect their customers’ illegal activities."

The greatest consequences of Nordic socialism are how it instills a lack of courage and imagination when facing global problems. For such a system to work, people must be mostly compliant and amicable. Currently, Norway can manage the economic shift by drawing from The Fund but I would hope that they want to do more than just get by. It is obvious that betting on fish is a bad idea.

For the first time in 9 months China's $9 trillion Shadow Banking Industry - defined as the sum of Trust Loans, Entrusted Loans and Undiscounted Bank Loans - contracted, which begs the question: will the biggest deleveraging ever attempted in Chinese history be smooth and contained, or lead to another financial crisis?

Global stocks and US futures are up for a second day, with the VIX sliding 0.58 vols to 11.75 (-4.7%) and haven assets dropping, after a KCNA report report suggested North Korea had pulled back its threat to attack Guam after days of increasingly bellicose "fire and fury" rhetoric with President Trump, and hours after China took its toughest steps to support U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang.

With the traditional post-payrolls market lull setting in, and most trading desks taking a week or two off, it will be a relatively quiet week with attention turning to inflation data with releases in the US, China, Norway & Switzerland, a key factor as central banks consider if/when to tighten in the near future.

Today, the Dolar Today website reported that Venezuela's black market exchange rate surged past 14,000 bolivars per dollar. When President Nicolas Maduro came to power in April 2013, it was at 24 per dollar.

"There have always been lags between the time of a policy shift and evidence of that shift in the broader economy. However, in a heavily indebted economy, with the velocity of money likely falling further, and policy rates close to the zero bound, the Fed’s current capabilities are decidedly asymmetric."

Growth in the supply of US dollars fell again in May, this time to a 105-month low of 5.4 percent. The last time the money supply grew at a smaller rate was during September 2008 — at a rate of 5.2 percent.

Overnight China released its latest monthly credit data which showed that even as China is trying to choke off its shadow banking sector, something we showed last month when we discussed the biggest crash in net bond issuance on record, credit to the broader economy continues to flow although some analysts are growing nervous that even this "crazy" number may not be enough.